Article in front of hardware or software

[SB <sylvia -dot- braunstein -at- gmail -dot- com>]

It was always my impression that when referring to a product XYZ in a
sentence, you use the article "the".  Configure *the* XYZ Switch as
follows...

However, with software, you omit it. For example: Use Microsoft Word
to author your documentation. Then again, you could say use the XYZ Switch
application...

Is there a grammatical rule for this?

Thanks,

Sylvia
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